Quantify How Much Time Your Company Wastes

Forty-four hours of meetings per week. Forty-six average attendees per meeting. Twenty-two hours of e-mail per week.

These numbers are not a dramatization; they are the actual year-long averages for a large technology company’s vice president. And at the managerial level, things don’t look much better: One IT manager, for example, spends 35 hours a week in meetings, sends emails during 85% of those meetings, and interfaces with an average of eight different teams each day.

There are so many initiatives, goals, people, customers, and vendors competing for our time that it’s extraordinarily challenging to just simply focus. While most would agree this overload negatively affects performance, it’s also something that’s notoriously difficult to measure. This is changing, however – just think about how many companies are utilizing sophisticated social intelligence algorithms to create a deeper understanding of their customers’ patterns and behavior. The next step is turning these analytics inward - harnessing the massive amount of e-mail, calendar, and messaging data a company already has - to diagnose surprising inefficiencies that exist at an organizational level.

Equipped with this information, companies can make decisions about how to better allocate what a recent HBR article (using VoloMetrix data) called their “scarcest resource:” time.

People analytics is not one-size-fits-all, as there are about as many ways to apply it as there are types of organizations themselves. But here are a few examples of how it’s helped managers better align their workforce with their business goals:

Identify expensive errors. A large IT organization we work with combed through its organizational time budget for a big systems integration project and found that a trivial requirement missed by a vendor cost $86,000 in its own peoples’ time to fix later on.

Monitor partner relationships. A new media company working with a partner company discovered it had over twice the number of their own employees working to support that relationship, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own peoples’ time.

Personalize feedback loops. To reduce organizational distractions and allow employees to better focus on priorities, a high tech company delivered personalized weekly reports to employees and managers. The reports were used for performance conversations to identify the issues and specific projects that were distracting people from the work that mattered most.

One fairly easy way to start analyzing your own company’s data is around what we call time fragmentation. This is based on the idea that making any real progress on thoughtful work requires more than a 30-minute increment of time, and that it takes 15 minutes to return to a productive state after an interruption. So when meetings and other workplace realities (such as email, hallway conversations, phone calls, bathroom and coffee breaks, etc.) are taken into account, a two-hour time block realistically equates to one-hour of productive work.

At one large software company, for example, we saw the average manager had only eight of these two-hour blocks of unfragmented time. That’s 16 hours available per week, which equates to about 8 useful hours. These same managers spent an average of 20 hours per week in meetings. After taking this into account, and assuming a 45-hour work week, managers were each left with nine lost hours per week because of fragmentation and too much context switching (45-16-20 = 9). That’s over 450 lost hours per year, per manager.

One solution could be a 20% reduction in meeting load through initiatives aimed at encouraging smaller, shorter and fewer meetings. We’ve found that a change like this can free up even more time for productive, unfragmented work than is saved on paper because people are less frequently interrupted.

While people analytics can be incredibly powerful for revealing patterns, I want to caution that it is not a panacea. In the end, effective management still requires the perspective of an experienced leader to ensure the data is viewed in context, taking into account factors like changing market conditions or the learning curve associated with a new initiative. In addition, companies that use people analytics should factor in a period of adoption, as people determine how they can best use the data and define the value of the analytics for their specific organization.

But by more closely tracking how you and your employees are spending your time, you may find new approaches to time management that go beyond individual attempts to work harder.

Ryan Fuller is the CEO and co-founder of VoloMetrix, a leading people analytics company acquired by Microsoft in 2015. Within Microsoft, Ryan leads the Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics product teams within Office365 focused on transforming organizational productivity and employee experience.